The Wrong Paper

The newspaper had the wrong date.

Not the wrong date in the sense of being behind or ahead — it was dated correctly, April 17, 2028 — but the masthead said The Oakland Tribune, and the Tribune had ceased publication in 2007. David Kellerman knew this because his father had worked there, and when they folded the paper, his father had come home at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and sat on the back porch for four hours without speaking.

He set the coffee down and picked up the paper again.

The Oakland Tribune, April 17, 2028. Thirty-five cents.

"Ellen," he said.

She was at the sink. "What."

"When did you buy this paper?"

"I didn't buy a paper. You bought it. You always buy it on Saturdays."

"It's Wednesday."

She turned. She looked at him with the expression of a woman waiting for the other shoe to drop, a specific expression he had seen many times during the long slow collapse of their life together and which he had come to associate with her trying to decide whether he was being funny or whether this was the thing, the thing they had been warned about, the beginning. "David," she said, "it's Saturday."

He looked at the kitchen clock. The clock said Saturday. The date on his phone, when he fished it out of his pocket, said Saturday, April 17, 2028. His phone also said he had seventeen missed calls from his daughter Miriam, which was impossible because Miriam had died of meningitis at the age of fourteen in 2019.

He put the phone down, screen side down, as though it were a small animal he did not want to startle.

"Who is Miriam?" he said.

"What?"

"Our daughter. Is her name Miriam?"

Ellen set down the dish she was drying. She walked over and put her hand against his forehead, which was a thing his mother had done, not Ellen. Ellen had always been a cataloguer, a sorter. She put things in order. She did not feel foreheads.

"Miriam is our daughter," Ellen said slowly. "She's twenty-three years old. She lives in Portland. She's called seventeen times this morning because she can't get you to answer."

"She died."

"David. No."

He looked at the paper. Oakland Tribune. He looked at the clock. Saturday. He looked at his wife's face, which was a face he had known for thirty-one years, and which was almost, but not entirely, the face he remembered.

"Where's the mole?" he asked.

"What mole?"

"You have a mole on the left side of your neck. Just under the jaw. It was the first thing I noticed about you, at that Christmas party in 1994, and I thought about it for three weeks before I called you."

Ellen touched her neck. There was no mole. There had never been a mole. He could see, in her eyes, that she was quite certain of this.

"David," she said, very quietly, "I think we need to call someone."

He agreed to call the doctor. While Ellen was on the phone, he went out the back door into the yard.

The yard was not his yard.

It was close. The fence was the same redwood. The lemon tree was in the same corner, though it was taller than he remembered, heavier with fruit, its trunk split at the base in a way he did not recognize. The picnic table was gone, replaced by a pergola he had never built. And at the far end of the lawn, where his garden shed should have been, there was a small greenhouse, the glass panes fogged with steam, a dim warmth pulsing from inside like a held breath.

He walked to the greenhouse.

There was a key in the lock. The key was his. He recognized the brass keyring — a gift from his mother, shaped like a small ship — and the weight of the keys, and the way the ring fit his thumb.

He unlocked the greenhouse and went in.

The air was warm and damp. It smelled of soil and tomato leaves and something else — a low, mineral odor like wet stone, like the smell of his grandmother's root cellar in Minnesota. In the center of the greenhouse, on a wooden table he had not made, was a terrarium. Inside the terrarium was a plant he had never seen before: a low, dark-leaved thing with pale violet flowers, each flower no bigger than a thumbnail, turning very slowly as though tracking something that was not the sun.

On the side of the terrarium, in his own handwriting, a label:

Miriam. Started 2019. Day 3,287.

He sat down on the concrete floor of the greenhouse.

Outside, dimly, he could hear his wife calling his name. She was calling him the way she had called him once, long ago, when Miriam was small and had wandered off at a beach — a voice with fear in it, but also a practiced calmness, a voice saying: I am not yet sure this is the worst day of my life. Help me not make it so.

He did not answer her.

He sat on the floor of the greenhouse that was not his, in the yard that was not his, of the life that was not his, and he watched the small violet flowers turn.

After a while, he began to understand.

He had woken up this morning in the wrong life. Or — and this was the part that made him very still, very careful — he had woken up in the life he was supposed to have had. The one where the meningitis had been caught in time. The one where Ellen had never fallen and struck her jaw in 2002 and had the mole removed as part of the reconstruction. The one where The Oakland Tribune had survived, somehow, because his father had been part of the group that pushed the rescue buyout through, the buyout he had walked away from in 2006 in that version — in that version — because he was already too tired, too bruised, too full of the particular grief that came from knowing his daughter was going to die slowly.

In this version, he had stayed. In this version, everything had gone differently, by small degrees, because here Miriam had lived.

And he, the David who had been dropped into this life this morning, was the intruder. The other David — the David who had been living here all along, calling his daughter on Saturday mornings, tending this small violet plant whose significance he did not yet know — that David was somewhere else now. Somewhere that had a dead daughter, a folded newspaper, a mole under a jaw.

He thought, with a sudden clarity: He will not understand it. He will wake up there and think he has gone mad.

He thought: I have to get back, so he can come back.

And then he thought: No. I don't.

In the kitchen, his wife was saying his name, louder now, her voice climbing the register of real fear. In a moment, she would come out into the yard. In a moment, she would find him sitting on the floor of a greenhouse he had never built, staring at a flower he had never planted, and she would call the doctor, and the doctor would say words like transient global amnesia and dissociative episode, and the other David — the one who belonged here — would be lost somewhere else, forever, calling for a daughter who could not answer.

And this David would remain. Because this was the life he had wanted. Not the life he had been given. The life he had wanted.

He stood up. He put the small violet plant in its terrarium back exactly where it had been. He closed the greenhouse door and locked it and put the brass keys in his pocket, where they fit, warm, as though they had been there all morning.

He walked back to the house.

Ellen was in the kitchen, phone against her ear, eyes wide.

"I'm all right," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm all right."

The phone was still ringing. Miriam, it said. He picked it up before Ellen could stop him.

"Dad?" the voice said. "Dad, are you okay?"

He sat down at the kitchen table. He looked at the wrong newspaper on the wrong Wednesday that was a Saturday in a life that did not belong to him, and he heard his daughter's voice for the first time in nine years, and he closed his eyes.

"Yes, honey," he said. "I'm here. I was just — I was just making coffee."